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One of Shigesato Itoi’s recent successes are his “Hobonichi Notebooks“, which are produced by his company. They’re no ordinary notebooks of course. If they were, then there’d be no need for his notebooks. Instead, they’re very well-planned out and very Itoi-ish in design.

Basically, it’s a small notebook that each customer can completely customize to his or her needs. You can choose what cover you want, what type of cover you want, you can have special stationery included, if you want some schedule-related stuff included, you can do that, if you want to use it as a sketchbook, you can get some stuff for that included. Calendars, train maps, diet stuff, cooking stuff… There are so many custom options that I won’t list them here. His company releases new ones each year, and they sell very well. People even line up at bookstores when new ones are released, and Itoi himself is oftenon hand to chat with customers and sign autographs and such at these release events.

My description seriously doesn’t do it justice at all, but it’s been enough of a phenomenon to make it onto TV, here’s one example. Sorry, no English subs 🙁

Anyway, I just discovered that a while back, some downloadable covers were put on his site, including this MOTHER 3 one:

In case you’re interested, the PDF file is right here. It was meant to be used for these special notebooks, so I don’t think it’ll be of much use to us, but hey, it’s an unknown piece of MOTHER 3 stuff straight from his site, so I figured I might as well post about it. Maybe people can find uses for it somehow anyway.

The Mr. Saturn is saying “Potential!”, just in case people are curious.

Actually Mato-San, couldn’t you do some guide to the japanese words used in the shipping formularies?

I mean, with the common words and lands in the forms and their translations. It would be usable for every order form on Itoi’s(or maybe even other Japanese sites, heh), and well, personnaly I don’t know a thing about Japanese ideograms, just some useless stuff like “hoshi” meaning star, “geemu” for game and things like that 😀

santiagoff: I decided to hold off on that article for a while actually. There are some other things I want to do first now.

Difegue: I could, that’s what I did for the Mother 3 t-shirts a few years back. But with something as crazy customizable as this, it might be a pain, plus the demand for it probably isn’t worth the effort.

santiagoff said on Mar. 20, 2009

Thanks for answering Mato! I hope the “other things” you are going to post in the blog are even more interesting than that article! However , I’ll still be waiting for that article XD
Good luck Mato! Thanks for this awesome blog! 😀

I believe the base notebook has lots of slots and pockets and whatnot.

Starmyster04 said on Jan. 14, 2013

was this available for buying at any point? with the new english techo, i’d like to be able to buy one maybe? or was it only for printing off to put on a day planner? i can imagine now adays one of these costing a fortune 😛